The Year of the Flood by Margaret Atwood

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A woman-centred story set in a dystopian future - but Atwood’s familiar tropes are starting to look a little tired

Like its predecessors, The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake,
this novel is of the dystopian variety. Set in “Year Twenty-Five”, after
some unspecified calamity that has wiped out most of the world’s population,
it depicts a society whose greed has resulted in environmental disaster and
the breakdown of law and order; and whose irresponsible meddling with Nature
has produced monsters: green rabbits, half-human pigs.

Moving between this Mad Max scenario and just before the cataclysm, The
Year of the Flood focuses on two characters. One of these is Toby, who
we first meet when she is holed up in